Learning with Rhythm & Grace

Students begin dancing for many reasons. Often times, they may start to feel more comfortable at a wedding or social occasion, or possibly to have a more active life-style, spend more time with their spouse learning something new, or any of the millions of reasons a person desires to dance. It's quite common for students to want to continue dancing long after their initial needs or goals are met. For that, we have our Recreational Rhythm™ program.

Recreational Rhythm™ courses are tailor-made to individual interests (generally discovered during their initial social beginner's classes) and follow industry standards of accomplishment, and typically ends in certification of achievement per level. Depending on the number of dances chosen to study, and the program goals one aspires to, the number of hours needed to complete the levels are variable.

Benefits of dance

Students report experiencing lots of positive change to their lives from dance and learning to dance. Over the years, we start hearing a recurring theme of many items our students find the most valuable that keep them dancing for the long-term and make it an integral part of their life-style. Of course, every individual is different, but when our student body was asked what they valued most from their lessons, these were the highest rated benefits our students they felt received:

• The meaning and growth a student experiences while learning to dance was rated of highest value.
• The play and humor they experience and develop through their lessons was the next most valuable benefit.
• The physical well-being they improve and experience was ranked as the next most valuable benefit.
• The peace and beauty student experience through their lessons was considered highly valuable.
• The interpersonal connections dancing with a partner was ranked the 5th most valuable return from learning dance.

No truer words could be spoken.

The importance of having goals

Often times, it is difficult to imagine that you would ever need more than just enough to get by when it comes to dance. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that view. In fact, most students of studios across the world are very happy to leave their goal there, and move onto other life interests. But, for many, early on, they come to discover that dancing can give much more than that. They might find the stress relief they experience to be hugely important. They may start noticing positive physical changes. Couples may discover how much they value the time they spend together while learning. It can be many different things to different people.

The question might then arise, "how can I keep getting these?", or "how can I get more?" That is the importance of goals.

Goals

Dancing, like any physical skill or anything that is worthwhile learning, needs to be approached in a (no pun intended) "step-by-step" fashion. A body needs time to acclimate to a new movement or technique, it needs time to go from the brain into the muscle. The mind needs to work less while the body just does what it needs to without the need to think before you move. It can get extremely overwhelming very fast to try new and more advanced patterns without first learning the fundamental skills that are needed to execute more intricate movement. In fact, that is the way to injury.

This is why we have dance syllabi. Theoretically, a dance syllabus (or step list) should be a gradient series of patterns for a dance that allows a person to develop at a practical rate and steady progress to a known end of skills and competencies. The most common way a studio refers to these levels are in terms of Medals. Bronze, for the beginning social dancer should graduate to Silver, an advanced social dancer. A Silver dancer should graduate to a Gold dancer, or long-term dance enthusiast and hobbyist.

These levels all allow a student and their instructor to set goals for their recreational dancing. It drives their progress and subsequently lets the student continue to experience the things they most value from learning to dance, simply because of their focus to a known target to attain in their dancing. Hence, the importance of goals.

Our studio uses the syllabi and curriculum offered by Dance Vision. The reason for this is not necessarily a knock against the schools that have their own in-house dance programs. It is because Dance Vision has an on-line learning platform that is accessible to everyone, not only professionals, for home study and review. Prior to this, only studios had access to such materials in the styles of dance, or they were exceptionally hard to acquire where they were openly published. Dance Vision was truly ground-breaking. We find utilizing Dance Vision as a study resource adds a significant value to our student's lessons, giving them the opportunity to get the most out of their lessons in our school by having this resource readily available on their phone or device.